ASUS GeForce GTX 980 STRIX Review

As expected ASUS is also amongst NVIDIA's launch partners for their new Maxwell based graphics cards. In this review we're having a close look at the GTX 980 STRIX, which is ASUS's flagship model for now. Therefore it features a custom PCB as well as ASUS's semi-passive STRIX cooler. This should be a rather punch combination and we're curious to learn more about this card.﻿

Presentation

ASUS is amongst the first Nvidia add-in-card (AIC) partners that have
decided to introduce a new custom GTX 980 graphics card which is using NVIDIAs
latest and greatest GM204 Maxwell chip. For this graphics card, ASUS makes use of a custom PCB
paired with its own custom STRIX cooler and on the flip-side of
the card, there is a good looking backplate. A quick glance at the specs
also reveals that this card ships factory overclocked.

Browsing the specifications of this card we find 2048 CUDA
cores, 128 TMUs and 64 ROPs. For comparison reasons, the GTX 780 features 2304
CUDA cores, 192 TMUs and 48 ROPs. This means that NVIDIA cut down the CUDA core
count as well as TMU count, but at the same time increased the number of ROPs.
Looking for reference clocks we find 1'126 MHz base clock and 1'216 MHz boost
clock.

As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, ASUS decided to use a
factory-overclock on their new GTX 980 STRIX. While the reference GTX
980 with GM204 GPU is set to work at 1'126 MHz for the base clock and 1'216 MHz
for the GPU boost clock, the GTX 980 STRIX runs at
1'178 MHz base clock and 1'279 MHz boost clock.

When it comes to memory clock speeds we see a tiny, 12 MHz frequency boost,
which makes the chips run at 7'012 MHz. Combine this with a 256 Bit memory
interface and you end up with a total of 224 Gigabyte of memory bandwidth.

The typical boost clock is set at 1'279 MHz, the maximum boost of 1'305 MHz
was achieved quite easily and the GTX 980 STRIX held that clock most of
the load time due to the capable STRIX cooler as well as good TDP target
(nVidia's Boost technology being power-based and not temperature-based on this
card). At this point we also run Furmark to see how high the card overclocks,
when the GPU is under full load. This way we can determine a worst case scenario
regarding maximum boost clock. With the card we see clocks speeds of 1'178 MHz
at 1.07v.